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If I asked you, what is the percentage you wear the wife hat compared to the mother hat, what would your numbers look like?

A mother to a newborn may look something like this 80% (mom) to 20% (wife). A newborn is very needy, so it’s understandable during this time to have your roles skewed.
Okay, you don’t have a newborn, so what are your numbers?

A friendly a reminder:
1. God
2. Spouse
3. Children

If your numbers don’t look closer to this 65% (wife) and 45% (mom), I have a challenge for you.
Take out your calendar and schedule at least two dates a month with your spouse.
#datechallenge

Is your marriage struggling? Do YOU feel like you are the only one putting any effort into the relationship?

Friend, don’t grow weary…seek God and He will give you the strength to push through, because it is His will for your marriage to succeed. But he doesn’t desire for you to just wait with a spirit of hastiness and irritation. He wants you to wait with love, peace, faith, and patience (with a good attitude).

You won’t be able to do this alone. Your attempts will only lead to frustration. Call on God and allow him to fill you with new hope and love everyday.

Have you ever felt disconnected, separated, like you were living with a roommate instead of your spouse?

The roommate syndrome is very common. It can happen at any time during the marriage. For us, it occurred between the third and fourth child. I love my husband and took care of him, but the butterflies had flown away. To be totally honest, life got busy. If I wasn’t pregnant, I was breastfeeding, and if I wasn’t breastfeeding I was pregnant. I had four kids within six years. I worked and homeschooled during all my pregnancies. I allowed my children to consume me…I was depleted and exhausted…there was nothing left to give my husband.

I could feel the separation, actually it was more like the Great Wall of China. One thing I started noticing was the lack of flirting and where was his eyes, not on me, how about his hands? I had pushed him away so far that there was nothing left but a cold environment of two roommates coming in and out of a house. One bringing in the pay check to pay the bills, the other was a CEO of the house.

I never stopped loving my husband and vice versa, but the sparks and fireworks were snuffed out. If you feel like you are living this way now, let me encourage you to pray. Fight for your marriage, ask God to help you to be the best husband or wife you can be, to awaken the passion and to open your eyes to your spouse’s needs. Second, go to your husband/wife and ask them to forgive you. Don’t expect it in return, it’s about you and your part. Let God take care of your spouse in His timing. Then, you guessed it…the fun part…let’s get physical, physical…a hand on their leg as you watch tv, a back rub as you walk by them in the kitchen, or even eye contact in the midst of a party to let them know they are the only one you really care about. Roommates don’t touch, but newly married couples can’t keep their hands off each other! I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the a newlywed marriage over a roommate relationship any day.

Let me leave you with this; Even though the cloud has been cleared from your vision, it doesn’t mean it has for the love of your life. Be patient, avoid nagging, pressuring, or ingenuine affection. The Colosseum wasn’t built in a day. Continue to pray and even fast, then patiently wait for God’s most radiant pyrotechnics show!

“What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?” -Gary Thomas

The truth is, marriage makes us confront our ugly that we may have ignored before. Just try to walk around the house with an attitude for a couple of days, or couple of hours in our house, it won’t last long without noticing. Our spouse challenges us in good and sometimes bad ways. Thankfully, we have God to lean on, in times of frustration, when the wrong buttons have been pushed.

We need to accept and remember from the moment we said “I do” you gave up “me” and replaced it with “us”. You quickly learn not everything you do is perfect and your opinions are not facts. Marriage is amusing, intriguing, and beautiful, but it’s design is greater than our happiness.

Marriage provides growth as an individual and as a Christian. It is a constant reminder of what commitment and covenant means. It also teaches us how to forgive time and time again, like our Heavenly Father forgives us.

Friend, the moment you think your marriage is all about “your” happiness, you’re in trouble.

“She is clothed with strength and dignity; she can laugh at the days to come.” Proverb 31:25

I love my new shirt from “She Is Clothing“…I wore it today to our second ladies small group meeting (From The Committed Heart). I shared, in today’s group, what it means to be committed to your spouse. Our culture relates submission and self-control as a weakness, but it is actually the opposite. Let me ask you, “does it take more strength for a woman to give a piece of her mind to her husband” or “does it take more strength for a woman to remain silent?”

No good can come out of a woman screaming and yelling at her husband when she doesn’t agree about something. Instead, I encourage you to pray, ask God to give you self-control and strength. Then allow God to take care of your spouse, but at least you kept your dignity, while honoring your husband and God.

Have you ever said to yourself, “Why did I marry this man? What did I see in him? He doesn’t even love me and I don’t think I love him either.”

If the answer is yes, then picture with me this: Does the leg say to the body, “I don’t like the direction you are walking, therefore I’m going to find another body to belong to.” Or does the body say to the head, “I don’t like how you think, so I’m leaving to find another head that agrees with me.” No, because they are one. Ephesians 5:31 says, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”The term “one flesh” means that just as our bodies are one whole entity and cannot be divided into pieces, so God intended it to be with marriage. There are no longer two individuals, but now there is one entity (a married couple)…Therefore, how can we separate from our body?

I know there are challenges in marriage. Some of our deepest emotional wounds can come from our spouse. They are the closest to our heart and know how to reach places that should not be reached, but that is not a reason to gruesomely pull “the body” apart.

When these thoughts come into your mind, you must stop them immediately. Do not feed or meditate on them…Instead, pray and replace them with promises of God’s love and truth.

My prayer today is for the married couples that are suffering, the ones that are ready to throw in the towel. God I ask you to speak to their hearts. I pray forgiveness takes place, pride gives in, and walls are crushed. Only you know the personal struggle each couple is facing this week, give them the strength to press on. Allow healing to take place where words have ripped them to the core. You are a miracle working God, not just in our health, but in our marriages and these marriages are sick…they are depleted and exhausted. I pray for a breath of fresh air and an amazing amount of love to wash over these marriages today. In Jesus Name Amen

*The above blog is not referring to emotional or physical abuse. Please talk to someone if abuse is happening in your marriage.

Marriage is made up of two people from different upbringings, personalities, ways of thinking, and maybe even different cultures. With all that going on, you add financial strain, pressures of work, a house to maintain and a couple of kids to raise and you have a pressure cooker ready to pop, unless…you have God at your center.

At the top of a pressure cooker is a regulator. The regulator releases the steam from inside the pot when it has built up. God is our regulator.

A couple of days a go my feelings were hurt by my husband. At that moment I could have exploded, put up a wall or even left the house, but I didn’t. Instead, I went to my closet and cried out to Jesus. I allowed Him to regulate the steam that was built up inside of me. I allowed God to remove the “me” out of the situation.

If ever you think you can handle your marriage on your own, be careful. It will be only a matter of time before you see an explosion! Don’t wait until it’s too late…ask God to be the regulator in your life and your marriage. Allow him to remove the steam and for healing to take place.